4 Reasons Why Egypt’s News Organizations Are Dying
The business model of Journalism is quite simple, a newspaper offers interesting content to people in need to know more, it sells more copies, it attracts advertisers, makes more money.
Internet comes in, offers more reliable sources of knowledge. As a result, print copies start to diminish. What to do about this? Easy. News organizations run the same model but on websites to make them profitable through online ad spaces.
With a complex audience like Egypt’s that exhibits some extreme and bizarre online habits like using Google to search for Google and looking up famous actresses’ armpits, news organizations had no choice but to follow suit and race to deliver what that audience needs. Whatever it is.
This resulted in a vigorous competition on which website can bring in more web traffic. Needless to say, most of them compromised editorial quality to gain more, some of them buy click bait, all for the sake of growing the glorious number of visitors that translates into money for advertising spaces.
As it looks promising for these institutions on the short run, this running competition is destroying a lot in Egypt’s journalism industry, including the competing institutions themselves.
Here’s why:
1- Old-school advertising will eventually die, the same way print journalism did.
Audiences need to be heard, they expect a two-way relationship, that’s the premise of how Internet makes money. The better a brand is at dialogue, the more influential it is in an inter-connected society that doesn’t stop at classes, locations or languages.
What’s worst than sticking to a classic model in a shifting market? Trying to enforce that classic model on the market.
2- What they win in ad revenue, they lose in brand equity and human resources.
Simple. People easily judge a brand in a matter of 5–10 seconds. The pieces these organizations publish, the look of their website, the responsiveness and the language used and even the frequency of their social media posts all contribute to their intangible brand equity. When they decide to sacrifice paying attention to this for inflating click rate, they win in ad revenue, they run operations and make good profits. Meanwhile, they lose their edge in the market, they lose their brand identity and transform into just another website that I don’t want popping in my browser. No one wins here. Employees who follow their lead on this strategy are either people who believe that this is the right way to do it and are mostly talentless, or depressed talents seeking financial stability in favor of doing what they do best.
3- They’re creating a gap in their own market.
When everyone applies the model of click-induced mania, they eventually kill their true competition and collectively distance themselves from people. Creating a gap between an audience that needs a proper, steady flow of relevant information without having to deal with extra annoyances and big moguls chasing them with poor content.
4- Content-based alternative revenue streams will take over.
Many innovative solutions are introduced to the online business of news, my favorite is native advertising. News organizations that can employ such models and adapt them to Egypt’s market have a golden opportunity to provide what audiences need, what brands need and make tons of money out of it.
Digital Strategist Ibrahim Gamal Eldin fuses a background in media production and political science with expertise in digital marketing to build full-fledged digital marketing strategies, Arabic and English online content, and creative direction for digital advertising. His portfolio includes 30+ clients including: Google, Sony Music, USAID, Kevin Spacey Foundation, Amr Khaled and Carole Samaha.
